Digging deep into FX on 30min time frame. Beyond the promising mean reversion approach I revived also a quite old breakout approach.

I cleaned up the files, linked them to the chart files and will have to look into them further from how they really “look”, but for now I am quite happy and mildly optimistic.

HR

On Saturday I broke my chain for meditation. I could blame my heavy home improvement work or relaxing too much after children were out that day, but I missed and it is in line with my poor commitment in general and seen in prior weeks. 5min before falling asleep is ok for one day, but not for 4 weeks and more in a row.

I have put into test phse my mean reversion semi-automatic system and on Wednesday instead of closing the position I was doubling. I also got a margin call on Thursday as I was slightly overleveraged and was out without my TAN codes to react. This is not the 1st time it happens – luckily it did not hurt me so far, but I need to find a way to a) avoid and b) be able to react when away from my PC.

Research

Not so much this week. I was working on the mean reversion approach, but that was more Admin work. Looked superficially into the FX 30min MR approach and applied it to 5min data with similar and consistent results. Dabbled around with VIX index and noticed the delta to VIX Futures. There may be some interesting points to look into in the future.

HR

It seems silly to repeat the same words every week. Now that I have given up on other goals and only maintaining execution and screening I should really change my approach to meditation as I am actually only lying 5min before falling asleep and trying not to think about anything…

Was ok. I notice different levels of effort on different days, but I think it is ok. I have to face many constraints, so I have to adapt and I can surely say that I did not miss any single day to screen since I started the blog, even if there were days were screening was quick and superficial.

Execution

Flawless.

Research

I had a lot of goals/tasks from last week and as expected was not able to meet them all. I started with my priority to look through all my backtested trades and select the most appealing to me on my discretion. Surprisingly (or not) most of them did not look appealing at all. The once I selected had a lower R than the sample and I started to dislike the approach. This may seem flipflopping directionless – and it probably is – but I think I do not have a better alternative.

I think I really have to manually backtest my pullbacks stock by stock which will be a huge task. This thinking process led to skip the rest of the tasks for now as they lack sense for now.

I still set-up the MR approach, faced some troubles but finally managed to start trading it with share size 1 on Friday. I have set up trades for Monday but will be out the whole week, so full go live (with share size 1) will be thereafter, but the prep work is done.

HR

All exactly the same as last week.

Still maintaining the chain for screening, execution and meditation unbroken which is the core of my work.

Meditation is slipping too much. I only do 5min before falling asleep. Need to improve and also revisit targets for sport and training.

Admin/IT

I screwed up my log file and saved it. Fortunately Dropbox offers a way to recover previous versions with the same name – great feature that saved my ass. Only took me 2 days to figure it out…

Looked again into slowness of IB TWS without success. Need to check back with customer support.

Quality

I have delayed working on the business plan by one or two weeks as I first need to finish the other pending steps.

Tasks for next week

Nothing, as I will be out. I will take my laptop in case I see a chance to work on point 1.

Again incredible abundance of attractive set-ups. Surprisingly not only on the long side. Many financials are setting up an Anti pattern but I prefer to skip them all. Market overall seems to be poised to set another trend leg up – the fact that it did not start on Friday is surprising (maybe a warning), as there may have been a trigger by US bombing Syria first time. Also the fact that financials do not look healthy may be a warning of may be exactly the tipping point once they improve to push the whole market… well, I am not a TV pundit, maybe it rains, maybe not. I am leaning heavily long and unfortunately I’ll be off completely next week so will mostly manage my existing positions. Pity with exciting set-ups…